Abstract:

Three experiments tested subjects' ability to recognize spoken words based on word-final phonological information. Experiment 1 replicated the finding [A. Salasoo and D. B. Pisoni, J. Memory Lang. 24, 210--231 (1985)] that when presented with phonological information incrementally beginning from word-offset (backward gating), subjects correctly identified spoken words in the absence of word-initial phonemes. Additionally, experiment 1 demonstrated that acoustic neighborhood size is a significant predictor of recognition probability for both forward and backward gated words. In experiment 2, word-initial and word-final acoustic word fragments were used as primes in a crossmodal identity priming task with a naming response. Both word-initial and word-final primes significantly facilitated subsequent naming reaction times. Experiment 3 replicated experiment 2 using an associative priming paradigm. The results are interpreted from a connectionist perspective. [Work supported by NICHD.]